Monday, November 5, 2012

money...keep your hands off my stash

One of the
contentions in this election is the 'redistribution' of wealth in
this country. According to the conventional wisdom the wealthy take
that to mean that the poor want to gather the town folk with torches
and pitchforks and storm the bank accounts of the rich, although the
rich didn't seem to mind so much the redistribution of wealth from
the hands of the middle class to theirs.

Personally, I
don't know anybody in the working poor, the working class, or the
struggling middle class that feels that way. We don't really resent
the rich for having money but we don't like the well being of the
rest of the population being held down by the unrestrained greed for
profit at any cost because that cost is born by the lower classes.

So, yeah,
everyone wants to be rich, to not have to worry or struggle but
regardless of whatever myth you grew up with, there is no such thing
as a level playing field in this country. The kid who is born in the
barrio or slum to a mother addicted to drugs with an absent father,
who very likely is a gang member, has so much more to overcome than
the kid born into a wealthy family that never knows what it means to
go to bed hungry night after night and while they both have access to
public education, the poor neighborhoods have poor schools while the
rich neighborhoods have rich schools. It doesn't really matter how
brilliant the poor kid is if he or she is hungry and abused, if the
schools he or she has access to aren't well funded. There is no
escape when these children have to drop out of school to take care of
their younger siblings.

But, back to
being rich. How much is enough? At what point does wealth stop
being sought after or acquired for ease of living and start being
greed? If, as conservatives say, the government can't just
manufacture money, then there must be a finite amount of money in the
economy.

If there is a
finite amount of money in the economy, what purpose does it serve to
hoard millions and billions of dollars? Obviously, if you are making
10 or 20 million dollars a year you left need behind long ago.
You've bought your mansions around the globe, you've got a private
jet and a yacht or two and still you are making more money every year
than you can possibly spend.

So the hoarding
begins. It's money for money's sake and it seems the more a person
has, the more fearful they are that someone wants to take it away
from them so they hide it in off-shore accounts. How is that being
patriotic?

If there is a
finite amount of money in the economy, how does the hoarding of great
wealth, the removal of that money from circulation, benefit the
country as a whole? If the people who have the money aren't spending
it, then there is less in circulation and less that is available to
the rest of the population.

This country saw
a massive movement of money in the last decade from the hands of the
people in the population that spend it into the hands of the 1 or 2
percent of the population that don't spend it. This hoarding of
money by the very few has impoverished the nation.

I think there
does need to be a redistribution of wealth in this country but not by
robbing the rich. The rich need to put that money back into
circulation instead of continuing to accumulate it for no other
reason than that.

A billionaire
who thinks nothing of donating millions to some charity balks at
donating the same money to the government, money that could go to
funding our schools or to rebuilding our infrastructure. Instead
they see it as a virtue to avoid paying the taxes they legally owe,
taxes that would not impact their standard of living one bit if they
actually paid them.

I read an
article today that talked about how all those billions sitting unused
is preventing entrepreneurs and small businesses that want to expand
from getting financing. The capitalists seem uninterested in
capitalism. The people who have the money to invest in the country
and the economy aren't doing it, perhaps because they are personally
unaffected by the recession.

I read another
article recently about a study on compassion. The conclusion was
that the more you have the less compassionate you seem to be. People
with little will willingly share whatever they have with other people
who have less but the ones with more than they can possibly use,
hoard it and live in fear that someone is trying to take it away from
them.

What the working
poor want, what the struggling middle class wants are not free
handouts but jobs and decent wages for the work they do and some
sense of security that the investments they make in their retirement
funds won't be lost by Wall Street, sucked into the hoard of money
some billionaire already has. What the country needs is some
investment in its infrastructure which is crumbling.

I don't think
that's too much to ask for from the people who gained so much from
this country.

13 comments:

Excellent post. For the life of me, I can't understand why anyone but about fifteen incredibly, profanely rich guys would vote for Romney. As my husband said to someone once, "You're not rich enough to be a Republican."

In my childhood family- we had a share the wealth for the betterment of all. We pooled our cash and decided where it would best be spent. There was never any greed, or so I thought...My brother broke the rules, robbed my piggie bank and became a bit of a shark. I didn't mind because I thought he was more needy than I, and I loved him. I guess it is a matter of spiritual maturity.I love this post, Ms. Ellen! I am voting for YOU!!!

I know this is on a small scale but my husband's family had a rich person who merely used her money to dangle in front of family. A women with many promises and little truth. The preacher at a defunct church received the same allotment of her neices and nephews. The grand balance was sent to the Baptist Convention to "buy" her way into heaven. This same amount of money divided among the young people she overlooked would have made a major difference in their lives.

"But, back to being rich. How much is enough? At what point does wealth stop being sought after or acquired for ease of living and start being greed?" Substitute greed for power and you have my thoughts exactly when I first thought them in college. It was then that I realized that I am a socialist. Or at least so sort of hybrid one.